On this day after Memorial Day, I was thinking about our last winter golf session. We always cover a number of subjects and one that seems to come up often in these sessions is “wars.” Of course there’s always been a war to talk about — the world has never been completely at “peace.”
But one “war” we all remembered wasn’t a war — it was a conflict, or maybe a police action or something else. It was the first war that couldn’t be called a war because Congress never declared it to be one.
But what I wanted to talk about today is that during our discussion we remembered that some of the terms and phrases we use today actually originated during the Korean “war.”
The term “bamboo curtain” was coined by Time magazine — it referred to the barrier of mistrust between China and its allies on one hand and the noncommunist nations of Asia and the West on the other. The bamboo curtain was equivalent to the iron curtain between the Soviets and the West.
When Communist North Korea attacked Haesong, South Korea, in 1950, the United Nations demanded the attackers withdraw completely. When that demand was ignored, the Security Council decided to send in the troops. The problem was that the U.N. didn’t have a police force as such, but they recommended that member nations take action, and 30 of them agreed to do so. President Harry S. Truman called out U.S. air and sea forces. The President was acting without a vote of Congress because he was responding to a security measure recommended by the U.N. At a press conference, a reporter asked the president if the war could be called a police action under the United Nation’s supervision, and Truman agreed that it could.
Someone mentioned that the term “to bug out” originated during the Korean conflict and no one disagreed, but later I checked, and it actually originated during World War II, but it was popular during the Korean War and it’s meaning changed a bit — it didn’t just mean a retreat or withdrawal, but a fast pulling out, to avoid being killed or captured. Since the war, it’s been used more loosely for any rapid departure.
Airstrike became popular in Korea — this was the first war in which jet fighter were widely used and that gave rise to the term airstrikes for attacks on enemy positions.
This was also the first war that helicopters saw a lot of action — they were nicknamed choppers, probably from the “chop-chop” noise made by helicopter rotors.
An interesting term that most of us hadn’t thought of was “buy the farm.” Since Korea was partially an air war, it required training flights — those were generally carried out in American rural areas. When an air force training flight crashed on a farm, the farmer could sue the government for damages sufficient to pay off his mortgage and therefore buy the farm outright. Since the pilot in these crashes usually died, he “bought the farm” with his life.
Even though aircraft were used extensively, Korea was primarily a ground war. When General MacArthur’s headquarters sent a dispatch to the Twenty-fourth Regiment to ask if they had contact with the enemy, they responded, “We is eyeball to eyeball.” The message was widely quoted, and later it was used with reference to the Cuban Missile Crisis — when the cold war threatened to become a hot one.
During the conflict, some four hundred thousand casualties were inflicted on U.S. troops. Treating casualties was the job of the mobile army surgical hospital, M.A.S.H. — a new term at the time that inspired a motion picture and television series of the same name.
The sick and wounded that were taken prisoner by the Chinese were subjected to brainwashing to indoctrinate them with Communist beliefs. The technique involved both physical and mental torture to break down a soldier’s loyalties and family ties. The word itself is a translation from a Chinese term for “thought reform.” The term is used today to mean changing someone’s outlook or opinions, usually by underhanded means.
While we were on the subject, someone mentioned that General Douglas MacArthur had been “fired” during the Korean conflict — and that led to his famous “old soldiers never die, they just fade away” statement. Most people can sympathize with MacArthur’s plight….. The U.N. instructed its forces to only expel the aggressors and to do nothing more. Supplies were flowing to the communists from Manchuria, behind the Chinese border, but the U.N. troops were not permitted to bomb enemy bases, airstrips, or supply centers because it might provoke an all-out war with the Soviet Union. Commander-in-chief MacArthur voiced his frustration loudly and publicly. In response, President Truman replaced him with General Matthew B. Ridgway — in effect ending MacArthur’s military career. In a farewell speech to Congress, the general quoted a barracks song about old soldiers like himself.
The Korean War, or conflict, was the first war the U.S. fought with such constraints assigned by another party. It added a few new phrases to our language, but it took the lives of nearly 4 million Korean people — 10% of the population at the time, while the Chinese suffered about 1 million casualties.
Nearly 55,000 Americans died in the conflict.
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